DayZ Sells 2 Million Copies

Another milestone has been reached for DayZ's standalone release. Dean “Rocket” Hall took to the social media sphere to make it known that the open-world, zombie-survival game has managed to sell more than 2 million copies.

GamesIndustry.biz caught wind of the Tweet, where Dean “Rocket” Hall wrote about the success of the “alpher” and tweeted the following message...

Just over 2 years ago the DayZ mod released. Today, the Standalone game just broke 2 million units in under 6 months https://t.co/o4WjnTs8Bi

What an amazing feat. It was barely a month after launch that the standalone “alpher” managed to sell a million copies, following suit behind Starbound, another Early Access game that also moved a million copies in under three weeks. Not to scrap a wound that's still sore on the aching butts of fanboys, but Starbound and DayZ seem to be performing better than Titanfall even though both games didn't have half as much hype or anywhere near as much promotional presence as the EA-published shooter.

DayZ has slowly been shaping (or rather, re-shaping) back into the game that it once was as an Arma II mod. Vehicles are still on the development roadmap, along with even deeper crafting functions, more zeds on the screen at once and better network stability and hacking prevention.

In spite of all its flaws, the game has racked up quite a following. In fact, even Chandler Riggs from The Walking Dead – the kid who plays Carl – opened up an account and plays DayZ online with his friends. It seems strangely meta that a Walking Dead star would play a game about surviving in a zombie apocalypse, but I guess it's just life imitating art at this point.

What's more is that DayZ's popularity is mirrored by its ambitious take on the zombie survival genre, opening up the playing field for others to follow suit with titles like SOE's H1Z1. The only thing that Dean needs to focus on now – especially after Bohemia increased the team size – is getting out the new content in a timely and well-rounded fashion.

Nevertheless, all criticisms aside, it's good news for Bohemia that they have such a solid success in a seemingly unsuspecting IP. I'm curious to see how well this will affect the future of the company, especially after Dean takes leave later this year, and whether or not they will continue to output more games like DayZ or keep pumping out military simulators with strong modding capabilities.